In the previous post on teruah , we mentioned that while teruah refers to the short blasts (of the trumpet or shofar) and tekiah תקיעה ref...

Rosh Hashana is coming up this week, and I thought I'd look at some of the words associated with the shofar sounds heard on that day. S...

In my previous post on the word " bar " בר, I mentioned that there was one more meaning I hadn't discussed. That, of course, ...

In my post about bar mitzva , I wrote bar בר means "son" (primarily in Aramaic, but also in Hebrew, see Mishlei 31:2) The questi...

As you may have noticed , I have not written a post in several weeks (actually a few months). While life always has other distractions (like...

When I was in eighth grade, I asked a rabbi a question. If we believe in only one God, why is God’s name in Hebrew a plural? I know I was th...

The Shabbat before Pesach is known as Shabbat Hagadol שבת הגדול - "The Great Sabbath". While the phrase " shabbat hagadol ...

In the post on simcha , we saw that there is a connection in Hebrew and other Semitic languages between words meaning light and sprouting, b...

We're all familiar with the word simcha שמחה - "joy" (and hopefully with the concept as well!). This noun is based on the ...

We previously discussed blo בלו , a tax first mentioned in the book of Ezra. Blo is mentioned together with two other taxes that are not us...

Lately there has been a lot of news about the proposed increase (and subsequent decrease) in Israel's excise tax on gasoline. Until I ...

We previously discussed the Hebrew word for fruit - p'ri פרי . Now lets look at a particular fruit - eshkolit אשכולית - "grapefru...

In honor of Tu B'Shvat, the Academy of the Hebrew Language posted a page about the Hebrew word for fruit: פרי - p'ri ( I prefer th...

Reader Zvi writes: With the impending partition of Sudan in the news lately, it would be interesting if you could address the multiple use...

In our post discussing sochen סוכן - "agent" - I wrote that it "is connected to segan סגן - in Biblical Hebrew a governmen...

We previously discussed a number of words with the root סכן. One word that might seem missing in that discussion is sakin סכין - "kni...

In the beginning of Shemot, the Israelites were forced to build arei miskenot ערי מסכנות - "storage cities" (Shemot 1:11). The ...

I hadn't really noticed before, but the Hebrew word for Greece, יוון yavan , is related to the name of one of the ancient Greek tribes, ...

This week, in Bereshit 37:3, we read about Yosef and his ketonet passim כתונת פסים. We've already discussed how ketonet means "c...

Last week, when leaving work in Jerusalem, a friend and I spotted an animal that looked like this (I wish we had a chance to take a picture ...